Innovation

So i am trying out a new way to blog. i have this new hightech phone thingy called the tmobile g1 and it has this nice little blogging tool that allows me to make posts easily from my phone. maybe this way there wont be 2 month gaps between my posts as i can conveniently post from the boring classes i sometimes have. although this phone is pretty innovative thats actually not the topic of the post. i also need to apologize as i am too lazy to capitalize all the proper letters and fix grammatical mistakes. there is no spell check on this fancy gadget of mine. regardless, i was sitting in a class of mine called environmental history and ideas and we started a conversation about how humans destroy the land that we live on. my argument was that all humans will take advantage of the land and use it to fulfill their needs, often not thinking about the health of the environment. some would argue that this is only something that modern humans do but even the nomadic tribes, burned down vegetation and cut down forests in order to turn them into plains and open space so that they could hunt the buffalo they used as food. this shows that it is something inherent in every single human. the guy that i was arguing this with made a statement that it isnt true, he said that there were many different kinds of people that lived in harmony with the land and didnt destroy it. i replied by saying that he cannot make that statement because we never let the histories of these people play out. because the history of the world is an imperialist one it is not possible to know how these people would have continued to live their lives. by him referencing them it was equivalent to him referencing unfinished history, he made an ending to a book that had no end. and he replied by saying there are tribes of people that live in rainforests that don't have anything to do with the outside world. they are uncivilised and don't destroy the land. and they have been around for centuries. this made me think about innovation. when does innovation happen. and i thought of these people and realized that human beings only invent when their environment makes them. when there is no way to get food but to kill a bison a man will create a weapon as he cannot kill a bison on his own. when there is too large a community to support on bison alone man discovered farming and agriculture. when there was very little rain and water was scarce humans developed refrigerators. human beings began to invent when their surroundings and environment forced them to innovate. the next stage of innovation seemed to happen when man had free time. when civilisation got to a point where men didnt have to be hunting all the time and women had enough tools to have been able to finish work faster and when communities began to make divisions of labor people had an over abundance of free time and they began to innovate. so i realized that innovation only happens at 2 instances, one instance is when the environment makes a direct need for innovation and the second when we have enough free time to not work. that group of people living in the amazon may not have taken advantage of their immediate surroundings possibly because the environment has given them enough support to be able to live comfortably. these 2 kinds of innovation also make me wonder if the reason for our over abundance of things because of boredom? certainly we wouldnt be suffering from environmental crisis if we only innovated when the environment made us innovate. it seems our problem is that we just couldnt work enough.